


Loyal

by savant (teii)



Category: Deadpool (Comics), Marvel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, M/M, Mentions of Death, Mild Gore, dog au, mention of miscarriage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 07:23:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3281903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teii/pseuds/savant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dog AU.</p><p>They say that the dog that's been seen prowling around their neighborhood came directly from the bowels of Hell, sired by Cerberus himself and once shepherded the condemned souls of the Seventh Circle. Peter might just be an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Pomeranian, but he's not going to let some mutt overtake his favorite fire hydrant if he can help it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loyal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silvermittt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silvermittt/gifts).



> So the trifecta of playing Ghost Trick, Okami, and Tokyo Jungle has convinced me that writing a dog AU is a Good Idea. HMMM. Let's see!
> 
> For Silver and her little demon pup. May they always be together 4ever. :')

They say that the dog that's been seen prowling around their neighborhood the past few weeks came from the bowels of Hell, sired by Cerberus himself and once shepherded the condemned souls of the Seventh Circle. That grass and flowers all wilted wherever he stepped, his fur was a sickly shade of reddish-brown, mottled with pocks of open sores and scars. Peter's never actually seen him. What he's learned about the new stranger all came from a rather over-dramatic Russian Blue who lives across the street, but he admittedly did get a whiff of brimstone every now and then when he's out on his walks, which made Peter a little worried.

The worry only intensified the night Peter hears a horrifyingly harrowing howl, one that promised bloodshed, pain, agony, and little else. Startled out of his sleep, Peter tore through the house and leaped into bed with his master and some female who offensively smells like she was made out of bubble-gum ice cream and had the gall to wrinkle her nose and call _him_ smelly. Normally, Peter would be all up for biting her ankles or whining at his master until he made her leave, but the howl was making his fur stand on end and he scooched his way towards his master, tucking his head into the crook of his arm. His master simply turns over to cradle the dog and smacks the girl in the face with a flailing arm.

The howling goes on throughout the night, and though Peter can't quite stop shivering, he feels just a bit safer knowing his master was fine.

\--

There was a fire hydrant on the end of the street, which Peter considered was _his_ fire hydrant. None of the other dogs on the street even sniffed at it, not even the pair of Alaskan Malamutes who lived right in front of it, though it may have something to do with all the water it stored. It was Peter's favorite, with its appealing gray hue, stout, sturdy stance, and comforting smell. He liked it very, very much.

What he didn't like very, very much was the sight of some other dog in front of it, his slobber dangerously close to Peter's cherished bathroom. Peter snarls, and lunges forward, even though his leash snaps taut, and his master pulls him back out of range of biting the other dog. He settled for barking as viciously as he could instead.

Finally, the dog slowly turns around, and Peter can see all of the scratches, mange, and thin, white scars criss-crossing over the Doberman's body, mostly centered on its face. Peter takes a cautionary step back, as the doberman looms in front of him. He feels a sharp tug on his leash, as his master makes a disgusted noise.

" _Yeesh_. C'mon, Petey, we'll come by later or something."

Peter does as he's told and trots next to his master as they turn back, but as soon as they do, he feels the graze of teeth on the back of his neck and the smell of old meat and decaying flesh and the curious sensation of being lifted off the ground and--

Peter yelps, and with a big yank, the Doberman pulls Peter's leash out of his master's grip. Seeing his chance, the bigger dog speeds away and leaps over a fence into the nearest house’s backyard. Peter spots the two Alaskan Malamutes siblings over at the far corner of the yard. Though startled, they quickly regain their composure and bounds over towards Peter, snapping and snarling at the Doberman in an attempt to startle it to drop the tiny Pomeranian. The Doberman simply leaps onto the patio furniture, knocking over a pitcher of lemonade and vaults over the hedge, disappearing into the next yard over and leaving Altaïr and Amaterasu barking furiously behind him.

Peter yips and yowls as loud as he could, and struggles to break free, but the Doberman doesn't pay him much attention as it is, slowing down to a steady gait as they duck into an alleyway, disappearing out of view.

Peter swings helplessly in his collar, having tired himself out from all the yelping. His big fluffy head did little to help him slip out of his collar. So he stares down at the ground and flattens his ears to his head, awaiting certain death--

in the form of a little girl.

Peter's normally good with kids, provided that they don't pull on his fur or pet him too hard, but he can't help but want to get as far away as possible from this one.

"Puppyyyyyy!" the girl screeches out, her pincers snapping excitedly and eight, red eyes curving up in glee. Peter whines out of fear as his canine captor finally releases him and drops him softly onto the ground in front of the girl, who immediately scoops him up into her scaly arms and attempts to squeeze the life out of him with all sixteen of them.

"Puppy puppy puppy puppy puppy!" she chants, dancing in place with her hoofs making sharp clacking sounds on the concrete. "I have my own puppy now!" 

Peter's vision goes wobbly, the ground spinning as he's being swung from side to side in the girl's arms, and at one point is turned all the way upside-down so that the blood was rushing to his head.

The Doberman yawns, making himself comfortable by lying on the ground as the little girl dances out her elation, both of them unperturbed with how queasy Peter was getting.

Eventually, she stops her giddy victory dance, and pulls out a short little scythe decorated with sparkly bat stickers on its handle. With a single quick cleave in the air, a blinding white light erupts from the slash, and Peter snaps his eyes shut, a terrified whimper caught in his throat. But the girl merely uses the flat side of the scythe's blade to rap the larger dog on the head a few times, narrowly missing slicing his eye.

"Let's go home, Wade," she chirps, "Mommy is gonna start looking for us pretty soon when she gets home from Gathering." With a bit of effort, she scrambles onto the Doberman's back as if it was a valiant steed. With his last surge of strength, Peter tries to wriggle out of his prison, but to no avail, as fourteen arms weave their way around his body, with the top two squashing his head down.

"Puppy, sit still, if you get loose and start floating into the Abyss, well..." the chimera girl trails off.

Peter parks his bottom straight down, becoming deathly still. The girl beams, and with an extra loud and completely unnecessary neigh, smacks Wade on the head once more with the scythe and the dog obediently leaps forward into the wormhole, blipping out of existence with the girl and Peter in tow.

\--

Peter liked to think of himself as a Good Dog. Maybe not the Best Dog, since he has a bit of a weakness for extremely expensive leather shoes and chewing on them, but he's pretty sure he hasn't done anything that merits getting dragged through an infernal portal of Everlasting Darkness. You'd have to be a very, very, _very_ Bad Dog for that to happen.

For one, this new place that the girl and the dog brought him to smelled terrible-- the scent of brimstone, which was bad enough coming from the Doberman-supposedly-named-Wade alone, was now horrifically overpowering, and layered with the thick stench of fire, smoke, and death so strong, Peter felt as though he could taste it. The scenery wasn't much to look at either. Besides a few pools of thick, swampy, gooey black muck surrounded by sand, there was nothing much to break the landscape's dreary monotony. All the while, an unnatural, stale wind wails on through the vast grey desert, blowing sand and ash into Peter's mouth and eyes. 

But the worst of it all was his canine kidnapper himself. In this otherworld, what little fur the beast had turned from sickly red to a cold, grim black. The rest of its body seemed to be ripped and torn apart, exposing his innards still throbbing, undulating, and squelching away, confined within its cracked rib cage. The skin around its left eye was completely gone, and Peter stares at the muscles attached to the eye strain and stretch as the Doberman surveys their surroundings, before the dog's head twists around and stares straight back at Peter with white, pupil-less eyes, long trails of saliva dripping through the gaps of its misshapen teeth. The Pomeranian feels an extra hard squeeze around his middle as the girl giggles, babbling excitedly at the little dog.

"You should have a Name. What should I call you?"

Peter shoots her his most baleful look from within his arm prison, but the girl doesn't seem to mind, already rattling off several suggestions.

"Corton the Warmonger? Rumborf the Tormentor? Mommy says titles are _important_. Titles make people Respect You," the girl tells Peter, nodding sternly as possible with her top four eyes narrowing.

"You're not very big, so you'll have to put that much more effort into a good Name. You'll notice that bigger things often have stupider Names because they don't need to think up anything clever-- like these gigantic, stomping things Mum has been bringing home from work lately-- _elephants_. Awful, awful Name. It sounds like elf pants."

Peter lolls his head to the side, doing his best to play dead, until he eyes a pile of crumbling skulls on the side of the road and wisely figures that it wouldn't be worth it.

"Or maybe you had a Name before? Wade doesn’t sound very menacing either, but Mommy said that was his Name before he came to live with us. But he's big, so he can get away with a stupid Name." The girl scrapes her talons against Wade's neck, along the already carved-in scars. Wade shakes his head, as if irritated, but keeps his concentration solely on circumventing the mud pits which were now getting larger and larger in size.

"I'll let you in on a secret, puppy," the girl whispered, grabbing Peter closer to her face, even as he automatically leans away. "Mommy said that a long time ago, Wade was actuall--eeee!" The girl shrieks, and Peter can feel them both slipping off the back of the Doberman. He snaps and yowls out of instinct and minimal choice given his circumstance, and he turns his head to see a head peeking out one of the mud pools, along with a gloppy hand curled around the girl's hoof.

"Gurly gurly gurl..." the mudman warbled, thick sludge bubbles forming and popping all over his body as he slowly rises out of the mud, "you be tottering 'round with baggies of meats and nicies, ain't you?"

Peter feels the arms around him squeeze him harder than ever and he fights to keep breathing at a consistent rate. "He's not for eating! He's going to be my hellhound!"

The mudman laughs-- an awful, sickly gurgling noise spewing from the back of its throat, and Peter whines, pressing himself into the girl's chest. He might not want to be a hell hound, but being a mid-day snack wasn't one of his life goals either. 

"Fat, flabby, floppy mutt likes that?” The mudman taunts. “What's it to do, squeak and cry? This one is no good for chasing the dead-- it doesn't even look like it can keep up with chasing its own tail."

But the girl simply rights herself, settling onto Wade's back and keeping Peter tucked into her left side, out of sight, glowering with all eight eyes.

"Wade. Hurt him."

Wade snaps forward, quickly sinking his teeth into the mudman's thick neck, his fangs disappearing into the gray sludge. The creature burbles and sneers, its expression shifting slowly as the mud resettles and wobbles. "I've been down in this comfy little shitpit before the sands even came. My bones, my skin all lie down in the bottom, all flaky, fickle, useless thing-a-lings; you can not take much more from me, mongrel." But Wade ignores the creature, as it bounds its way through the pits, dredging the sentient blob out of its hole.

"Put me back! Put me back!" The mudman shouts, trying to ooze its way back towards its original pit, but Wade surges forward, the mud sluicing off bit by bit as the hell hound gains speed, leaping over mud pit after mud pit until the landscape shifts, from swamp to dry, dusty desert.

Eventually, there is nothing left of the mudman but his head, less than a quarter of the size it once was in the pit and it moans, long, raspy and chalky, the sound chased off by the howling wind. Wade sets it down on a small sand dune. He starts digging through the sand a bit of ways over, paws flinging sand behind him, and the girl and Peter do their best to hold on. Eventually, the hole is to his liking and he trots merrily back towards the shrunken head, clenches it between his teeth and with a vicious toss, manages to dunk it right into the hole. He bounds over to the hole and with a backwards kick, sprays a cloud of sand over the remaining bit of head until there was nothing poking out, the muffled screams finally dying down.

"All done?" the girl asks, impatiently whacking Wade again on the head with her scythe, nearly cleaving off a rotten ear. The hound growls softly, but obediently jumps away, continuing their trek home.

\--

They keep up the pace, crossing sand dune after sand dune until they reach a castle-- or something akin to it. A desolate, grey edifice that was made out of large slabs of black rocks, the edges of the slabs sharpened to a razor edge. Adding to that, its spindly, twisty turrets and smoking chimneys atop of every one made it look like a incredibly large, and incredibly angry hedgehog.

They come up to its massive wooden doors, and the girl once again takes out her scythe. With a single tap of the scythe onto the doors, they rumble ominously, before creaking open, ushering them inside.

“Welcome home, young Mistress Mortilla,” a skeleton in impeccable evening wear greets the girl as soon as they enter, bowing curtly. “Master Wade,” he adds upon seeing the hell hound, petting him gently on the head with a bony hand. The skeleton then takes a long, gnarled mahogany walking stick and raps sharply on a small door embedded into the stone wall at their feet. From it, a swarm of tiny imps, knobbly and greasy with skin wrapped tightly around bones and bulging potbellies bursts out from the little door and scuffle their way towards the newcomers, licking at Wade and Mortilla's paws and hooves to clean off the crusted mud and sand. 

“Yorrie! Look at what I got!” Mortilla excitedly shrieks, her hooves hitting ground again as she proudly holds up Peter. The skeleton butler leans down, inspecting the fluffy dog, and Peter whines pitifully.

“Very well, young Mistress,” Yorick sniffs, “shall I put this one with the rest of your….collection?”

Mortilla pulls Peter away out of sight, sticking her two forked tongues out at Yorick. “No! He’s s’posed to be my hell hound! I picked him out myself!”

"It's traditional for young monsterlings to wait until they receive their Gathering robes before selecting a hell hound,” he reminds her.

"Uncle Samedi said I should have a hell hound by now, and that traditions are stupid."

"Quite," Yorick intones flatly. He turns to look at Wade, who's shooing the last of the imps back into their hovel. “Mistress Death was looking for you, she will be arriving shortly from work."

“Awww, Mommy’s not home yet?” Mortilla whines.

The butler turns his attention back on the little reaper in training. “Young mistress, did you take Master Wade out again without your mother’s permission?”

“Mommy said I couldn’t go to the fleshie world without taking Wade with me,” she pouts.

“You know better than to call the living world that name,” Yorick sniffs haughtily, as if they’ve gone through the same argument hundreds of times over.

“But Hades says it! And you let Hades do anything he wants!” Mortilla huffs, stomping her hooves petulantly.

The skeleton pulls at his collar, clearing his throat. “I thought we had an agreement that we were not to speak of this…”

“You know, Mommy’s going to be awfully cross with you if she knew you helped him let that Orphie guy leave with his wife....”

“And yet another dessert shall be sent to your room upon completion of supper,” the skeleton relents, not wanting to bear the wrath of his employer.

The girl giggles, and with that, races into the manor, still clutching a terrified Peter to her chest, with Wade bounding after her.


End file.
